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My People:
I believe that a few of you might have watched this interview on SaharaReporters:
http://saharareporters.com/videos/2015-election-president-goodluck-jonathan-entitled-run-professor-mobolaji-aluko
In fact, my attention was pointed to it by some friends and colleagues.
As is often the case on the inimitable Sahara Reporters, it is the commentaries AFTER a piece that one finds always interesting and colorful. It is often best to just read and enjoy them – and move on.
On this occasion, let me lay some facts down:
1. This interview was conducted in December 2013. Why it is being run just NOW by my friend and blogger Kayode Ogundamisi – almost seven months later – beats me. But there must be some reason for it – and I will be asking him.
2. The title – 2015 Election: President Goodluck Jonathan Is Entitled To Run – Professor Mobolaji Aluko – is eye-catching, but that simply was NOT the stated purpose of the visit or even the interview. My commentary on the alleged re-election bid of President Jonathan was one minute of the one-hour interview, yet, in typical Nigerian media hype fashion – and knowing that many Nigerians (eg of the Free Readers Association genre) read only newspaper/media headlines and nothing else – a minor election issue was made the headline.
3. While the interview was held over a one-hour period – including quite some periods of equipment malfunctions and tape exchanges – Kayode Ogundamisi and his two-person crew spent over three hours with me on Federal University Otuoke campus, filming all the work and asking about the academic programmes going on all over campus. I was hoping that there would be some cut-aways to those shots as the video of this interview proceeded, but that did not happen. Failing that, I would now hope that there would be such in a Part 2 so as not to waste all that other footage.
4. Of course, I knew the temptation running through the head of the interviewer: to wrap me up into some political controversy because he had come to the home town of the President, where the university has precincts. I was always smiling both outside and inside as I parried his questions. He is not the first media person who has tried to do that, and he will not be the last.
5. Let me repeat the spirit of the headline though: President Jonathan has every right to offer himself to re-election, except a court of law stops him for whatever reason. If such a court does not, then his party has every right to compare him with other party candidates in a primary (consensual or not) contest of their party. From there on, it should be up to the Nigerian people to decide between him and candidates of other political parties, in what I hope with trepidation to be a free, fair and credible 2015 presidential election – coupled with legislative and other gubernatorial elections. It should not be up to some commentators on SR – or political barons in some smoke-filled rooms – to debar him.
6. The views that I express in No. 5 above have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with my sensitive position as a Vice-Chancellor at Otuoke – I am in its fourth year now, and a number of people should get used to it. It is obnoxious caterwaulers and weak-thinking demagogues who try to make that link. Rather, they are the clinical views of a Chemical Engineer professor who has every right to comment on political affairs – and has deployed that inalienable right over the years without any apologies. That blackmail into silence has never worked – and will never work. Discussion of politics is too important to be left to caterwaulers and demagogues – or to social scientists for that matter! 🙂 As head of a university brimming with public intellectuals, I can even afford that less now.
7. Finally, there is this commentator who wrote his name as (Dr.) Dapo Odumosu, who says we entered Great Ife together (in 1971). Presumably he finished his medical studies seven or eight years later, and should now be at least 60 years old. Unhappy with the interview – and I am sure particularly the headline, because he prefers some other candidate – he accused me of a clouded brain – without coming anywhere near me for the past 38 years since we left Ife. He must be a wonderful brain surgeon. [Dapo Odumosu might have been a ping-pong partner – but I may be mistaking him for somebody else.]
And there you have it.
Bolaji Aluko
Vice-Chancellor
Federal University Otuoke
